Terraforming (Part Five): The End Is Never The End

You thought I was done with these posts, didn’t you? I mean, I described the end of Naviim in post three, and the only progression since then was talking a little bit about some odd supernatural element that had more of a timeless quality to it than anything. And even then, there was still a mention of the apocalypse.

Well, first of all, the worldbuilding process has never been particularly restrained by chronological order. A single element, such as, say, a pantheon of gods and the associated mythology, would use many points on the timeline, from the creation of the world to the eventual end of days. But that seems like an intuitive element of the process once you think about it for a moment. As a creator, you have the entirety of a realm’s history spread in front of you all at once, it wouldn’t make sense to go through things the same way your population would.

But the more interesting element that I want to talk about, one that I feel as if I’ve known for a while but only recently experienced in practice, is the lack of finality in anything. Not in a “you’re never finished, it’ll never be perfect” sort of way -- that’s just perfectionism -- but a “there’s always a ‘what comes next?’” And this seems a little antithetical to the first point, right? The previous paragraph was all about not simply going down the timeline and here I am now saying that you can, with the implication that you occasionally even should.

The resolution to this paradox is in the perspective and the size of the canvas, because the first point, in my mind, assumes a finite beginning, middle, and end, kind of like a story. The second point does conflict with this, but more in a “the canvas is infinite” sort of way. In my case, Naviim’s apocalypse wasn’t final. I mentioned a safe haven survivors could flock to. That could succeed or fail. The world could literally break apart and people could cling to the rocks and attempt to start anew. Until the universe is literally snuffed from existence, there will always be something going on.

-F